I think you asked the same question twice, but correct me if I'm wrong. 1. Can Mac OS see previously erased disks? No. 2. Can Mac OS logs reveal disks it previously erased or formatted? Yes. But is that your question?
– TmanokFeb 27 at 3:36

@Tmanok my first question was whether it can be seen from the disk that is about to be erased. Say that contains macOS on it. Will macOS know that it is about to be erased? Also, the Disk Utility log button is greyed out.
– SealsRock12Feb 28 at 2:34

Hi SealsRock12, what version of MacOS are you using? To answer your question, files, including an operating system that get wiped from a hard disk won't be able to know they themselves have been removed from existence. Kinda like if you die, you wouldn't expect to know you're dead if you simply become nothingness. The operating system that wipes the disk however should have a log file of the disk being wiped located here: ~/Library/Logs/DiskUtility.log unless you're using Mac OS High Sierra or above: discussions.apple.com/thread/8367022 you're SOL, Apple no longer cares about us.
– TmanokFeb 28 at 23:30

Hi Tmanok, this is from the recovery partition, and the main disk is currently running Mac OS Yosemite.
– SealsRock12Feb 28 at 23:44

1 Answer
1

If you use Disk Utility from the recovery partition, any other partition affected by the actions you take will not be visible after a reboot.

Assuming you're in the recovery partition, no logs will be produced by the recovery partition because it is a read only partition (supposedly). The reason being, is that the recovery partition is meant to be stable and non-corruptible.